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Wednesday, 1 August 2012

A
kaleidoscopic pulp thriller, following two generations of drifters embroiled in
a saga of sex, drugs and murder on the road between London
and Kathmandu.

What's unique about it?

The brief window for counter culture travellers between Europe and Asia, now known as the overland hippie trail existed from
only the late 1960s to 1979, the time of the Iranian revolution. During those
heady days, countless alternative deviants travelled from Europe to the
Subcontinent overland and indulged in the traditional hospitality of Turkey, Iran,
Afghanistan and Pakistan. This
all ended with the revolution in Iran. I travelled the same route in
1998, through a much changed, meaner and harder world, and I also met and
talked at length to travellers who did this trip over and over in the early
1970s. Those were truly different and freer days, almost unimaginable today. I
tried to bring this period back to life and in this sense The Devils Road to Kathmandu is a historical thriller with a
subject matter that is rarely touched upon in (crime) fiction.

What are your expectations for The
Devil's Road To Kathmandu?

I expect it
to do well. The original print edition got great reviews. And I am biased of
course; first I am the author; secondly, as part owner of Crime Wave Press, a new Hong Kong crime fiction imprint, I am also the
co-publisher of this particular edition of the book and this is the publisher’s
first product on the market.

How important is talent?

Talent is obviously important, but skill and experience are just as
necessary if you want to make a living as a writer. I have been writing for a
living for the past 15 years and at the beginning of my career – besides
fiction, I write journalism, documentary screenplays, non-fiction books and
guidebooks, all on subjects connected to Asia
– I functioned on pure energy and enthusiasm. My early articles and books burn,
burn, burn but lack in general writer’s
savvy. It’s a long hard road
to becoming an accomplished writer who can make a sustainable living from his craft. Learning to
write is a bit like learning to speak a language. You get by with pidgin and
signs for a while, but then, to express complex ideas, the nitty-gritty of
technique and knowledge is absolutely necessary.

What do you do when you're not writing?

I don’t have
much spare time. I am currently setting up a new crime fiction imprint with
publisher Hans Kemp of Visionary World. Crime Wave Press is a Hong Kong
based fiction imprint that endeavors to publish the best new crime novels from
Asia and about Asia to readers around the
globe. Incidentally, Crime Wave Press is currently looking for authors.

Besides
writing, I travel a lot on magazine assignments around Asia.
In my spare time, I go trekking, scuba diving and read, read, read.
Occasionally, I play guitar in Rock'n'Roll bands.

How much do you read?

I read a lot, several novels a month, as well as numerous non-fiction
titles and countless articles. It comes with the job, reporting on culture,
travel and politics in Asia, I constantly
absorb information to be able to provide information.

I read
fiction vociferously – especially noir crime fiction like Jim Thompson, David
Goodis, Ross MacDonald and Massimo Carlotto, as well as more general fare,
anything from Joseph Conrad to Graham Greene to Philip Kerr.

How much time do you dedicate to writing? How much time would you like
to spend writing?

I write pretty constantly and 16-hour days are no rarity. I also travel
a fair bit and write while I travel. Right now I am in France writing my third novel, which is set in Laos. I am also
editing someone else’s
novel which is set in India,
Thailand and Laos. I have
just completed a magazine assignment on street food in Cambodia, am
preparing a pitch for an illustrated book, and am discussing a screenplay with
a documentary director.

How much time do you dedicate to promotion?

I dedicate a fair amount of time to promotion. I run two blogs (www.tomvater.com & http://thedevilsroad.com), three facebook
pages and contribute to many other blogs. I’d say I am fairly tireless and promotion is an
integral part of the
job.

In July 2011, I published a book called Sacred Skin (www.sacredskinthailand.com), the
first English-language book on Thailand’s spirit tattoos.
The title has become something of a bestseller, especially in Southeast
Asia, and has garnered more than thirty rave reviews, including
three pages in TIME Magazine, as well as positive coverage stuff on CNN, in El
Mundo, Die Zeit, Courier International and many other publications. The book
has been the subject of two documentaries. All this PR was time-consuming, but
in the end, the solid sales seem to make it worthwhile.

How effective is social media as a marketing aid?

That’s very hard to say.
I must say I am not totally convinced by its effectiveness, in terms of PR for
my work, of sites like facebook. But I leave nothing to chance and contribute
regularly to fb, google + and goodreads.com. My blog www.tomvater.com gets some 20,000 hits a
month and has landed me assignments.

Do you write outside of the crime genre? If not, would you like to?

Yes, I am a widely published writer with a focus on Asia.
I write for the British broadsheets, the Asia Wall Street Journal and countless
other publications. Together with director Marc Eberle, I write documentary
screenplays, including The
Most Secret Place on Earth, a seminal film about the CIA’s largest covert
operation, in 1960s Laos.
Together with photographer Aroon Thaewchatturat I have published a number of
illustrated books, most notably Sacred
Skin. See above for further details.

Do you have any other projects on the go?

The Cambodian Book of the Dead (Amazon
UK | Amazon
US),
my second novel, is out now as a Kindle eBook with Crime Wave Press and made it
into the Top 100 Hardboiled novels on Amazon within three days of publication. It’s the first Maier mystery. I am
currently working on a second Maier mystery, due out next year.

German
Detective Maier travels to Cambodia, a country re-emerging from a half century
of war, genocide, famine and cultural collapse, find the heir to a Hamburg
coffee empire.

As soon
as the private eye and former war reporter arrives in Cambodia, his search for
the young coffee magnate leads into the darkest corners of the country’s
history: A beautiful, scarred woman with a mythical and frightening past, a
Khmer Rouge general, an ex-pat gangster, an old flame, a man-eating shark and a
gang of teenage girl assassins lead the detective back in time, through the
communist revolution to the White Spider, a Nazi war criminal who hides amongst
the detritus of another nation’s collapse and reigns over an ancient Khmer
temple deep in the jungles of Cambodia.

Maier,
captured and imprisoned, is forced into the worst job of his life – he is to
write the biography of the White Spider, a tale of mass murder that reaches
from the Cambodian Killing Fields back to Europe’s
concentration camps – or die.

The
print edition of The Cambodian Book of the Dead will be launched at the
UBUD Writers and Readers Festival, one of Asia’s largest literary events, in Bali in October.

About Me

I'm a Scottish writer. My debut novel, TWO-WAY SPLIT, was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger award and went on to win the Theakston's Crime Novel Of The Year. I'm the author of four other novels: KISS HER GOODBYE (nominated for an Edgar), HARD MAN, SAVAGE NIGHT and SLAMMER and three novellas: KILL CLOCK , KILLING MUM and BYE BYE BABY, a Top Ten Kindle Bestseller. I'm also a co-founder (with Kyle "Smudge" MacRae) of digital publishing company, Blasted Heath, and a literary agent with Jenny Brown Associates.